Brother

One day he took my hand, looking down with his sun-eclipsed eyes and said, "Follow me." With that we skipped among puddles and danced our youth aside. Brothers are respectful adversaries and bone-deep comrades... and we never confused one with the other. And when my skin is worn loose and my door feels like a distant cage, I know he will still set out the pieces, waiting for my move. And even though I will lose, as I always do, the chance for redemption is enough to draw us back. "Your turn," he'll say. Because this is how he is known to me. He is a man, a son, a husband, a teacher, a thinker, a writer, an artist. He is the sum of many things unthought by me, but when I conjure his image in my mind, I see none of these, for how could I? Instead I see the boy with a quiet smile, an awkward pose of bravado, filling me with a sense of found. We both know he doesn't have all the answers, but it took time to arrive with questions. And for the better part of our journey, even if he didn't know the way, he would guide and I would follow because this is how he is known to me. Even now, in my cocksure days when we quibble and squawk, I listen. More often than he used to, he listens back. And whether it's a kindness or a reality, I don't care. He knows it's what I need from him now (he always did try to out maneuver me). Maybe one day, when I've retired my kings, and philosophy is my only recourse, we will talk of Nietzsche and Kant and Plato, and we will laugh at the fools they were as old women laugh of their men. Him, with an ocean of memoirs, and me with my poetry, we'll take the world on just this one last time, wearing shit-eating grins and cheap cologne, we'll walk right up to God himself and demand our well-deserved answers, only to see which one of us is right after all. This is my image, my icon. This is how he is known to me - as Brother.